Blur
by Queen of Dreaming
Summary: Arthur is more professional than this. Eames is not. In which Arthur does not acknowledge anything, and the past refuses to die.


**Title:** Blur (Minutiae)  
**Characters/Pairings:** Arthur/Eames, of a sort**  
Rating/Warnings: **Sexual references, violence (nondomestic), cussing, brief references to bondage kink, control-freak tendencies**  
A/N:** Crossposted from LiveJournal. The advantages of that site include a willingness to acknowledge the existence of parentheses in titles, among other things. If anyone wondered.

* * *

Arthur is not this immature, this _amateur._

The past is there to prove it; he's worked with exes before without any trouble. It's a matter of self-control, carefully drawn boundary lines, and a black-and-white division between _acceptable_ and _personal_, as precise and professional as a business suit.

And therein, Arthur thinks, lies the crux of the problem: Eames has never been professional save when he's forging someone with the capacity, and even then it never lasts.

There's a certain vicious twist to that line of thought, but under the circumstances Arthur will allow himself that much; he can't help it. Eames's insufferability has become no less pronounced in the months since the Fischer job; being around him is a near-constant litany of kicks to the chair, sardonic pet names, words with two or three or four meanings flickering across Eames's nimble, lying tongue. The forger is a petty bastard; it shouldn't come as a surprise.

(Under the bitterness, Arthur has to grant that this isn't entirely accurate. What he has known for years is that the other man places great import on small details. Sometimes this takes the form of rakish grins and a thumb brushed against the tender skin under the wrist, across the scars from years of dreaming; right now it takes the form of stolen pens and coffee ruined by too much foam and a loaded look shot Arthur's way every time he adjusts his tie. The look says _You may seem picture-polished now, but I know how you look in nothing but sweat and rumpled sheets and that tie wrapped around your wrists, and don't you ever forget it,_ and Arthur hates it with a passion that he cannot afford.)

* * *

"But how do we plan for that without knowing what kind of projections she's going to throw up?" Ariadne asks, eyebrows crunched in the frown that Arthur is fairly sure means she's upset about being the one she doesn't know.

"We don't," Eames says, lounging lazily in his crisp white chair with all of Tokyo at his back. "We get there and then improvise."

"No, we don't," Arthur says, and adds before he can stop himself, "we learned that one in Reykjavík." In Reykjavík Eames proposed exactly this, and somehow persuaded Arthur to go along with it; the plan collapsed, the forge failed, and Arthur added several thousand dollars to the worth of his head.

For a brief flicker of the present Eames has astonishment written all over him; he rapidly rearranges himself into an eyebrow-conveyed _well then, fuck **you**_.It takes a moment for Arthur to check his internal records for the last time that he referenced their particular schemes, and he's slightly surprised when the results come back nil. This is not the correct moment to contemplate that – there _is_ no correct moment to contemplate that – and so Arthur reins his attention in and directs it back towards the group, wherein Eames is grimly conceding with no explanation at all.

"But if the plan isn't going to work with her projections, then we'll improvise," Eames insists the instant Arthur regains focus. Too-casually the forger drops, "As we learned that time in Calcutta."

It hits Arthur like a slap; he refused to take an unchecked shortcut and got shot in the leg, but what he remembers isn't the blinding pain or the miscalculation but the blood droplets pooling on the baked cement, his totem lost somewhere in the chase, his own cracked and alien voice screaming at Eames to let him fucking kill himself, this was a dream, this had to be a dream because he'd abandoned his entire life for a career where bullets would lack consequences, where he wouldn't gasp for breath and find a mouthful of blood and blistering heat and the certainty that there was no more than this.

Now, in the present, in the reality of an air-conditioned room and an unharmed body, his eyes are somehow closed. He forces them to open and discovers himself the center of attention, his fingers clenched on the arm of his chair, and Ariadne presenting him with a look he'd hoped would remain reserved for Cobb.

_Fuck,_ he thinks, wishing the English language were more extensively obscene.

When Ariadne and Yusuf demand explanations, he outlines the relevant points of each tale and doesn't bother to explain that these were strictly two-man cons.

* * *

Their floor of Saito's building is empty, lit mostly by the city lights shining through the windows, so Arthur allows a carefully measured modicum of tension to seep out of his muscles as he drops into his chair. Like a puppet who holds his own strings by one of those Escherian geometries he loves, and is now allowing a little slack into his limbs.

That doesn't mean he's slacking _off_, however; he's here to review their plans. He reaches for their basic outline and isn't nearly as surprised as he ought to be when he finds that his fine, measured script is now augmented by the messy looping spikes that he's fairly sure comprise Eames's natural hand. This is unusual; it isn't that Eames generally bothers to make his writing tidy – that would be convenient for somebody else, after all – but he typically swipes a stranger's illegibility.

Come to think about it, Arthur is fairly sure he hasn't seen the forger's normal scrawl since one night in the depths of a Chicago winter, when a snowstorm killed the power and the two of them passed the time by getting piss-drunk and attempting poetry. The memory is all too clear: cheap ballpoint ink on surprisingly good paper; Eames's work, all tumbling enjambments and unpredictable rhymes with an approach to dashes and capitalization that owed more than a little to Emily Dickinson; the loose-limbed, sprawled-cat alcoholic ease that Arthur almost never permits himself; the glitter of the candlelight off of Eames's eyebrow ring as he chuckled at the fact that even in this state Arthur still attempted a perfectly punctuated sonnet. One of their pens snapped in Eames's hands, spattering him to the wrists; by the next morning there were blue-black smudges on Arthur's waistcoat buttons, on his shirt, dark across his shoulders and collarbones and ribs, and humiliatingly indelible across his cheekbones.

He rubs at his forehead until the candlelight dissolves back into the present half-lit fluorescents, ascribes the detail of the memory to his job well done and nothing more, and focuses on the cold facts all over his paper.

* * *

The evening before the current con, Arthur is out on the balcony, rolling his die on the broad railing in spite of the drop. This is an unwise thing to be doing, but some dimly cloudy nights convert professionalism into a limited resource. Tomorrow needs to be crisp and efficient, perfectly tidy, and tonight the sky is as gray as unwashed wool.

Footsteps clank behind him; a quick glance reveals Eames, who Arthur knows has been on edge all day. "What are you doing?" the forger asks, oddly serious. "If you're going to jump, wait until tomorrow," he tacks on; black humor has never been Arthur's flavor or Eames's strong suit, and the only thing that tumbles to the ground is the joke.

The point man holds up his die, wine-colored in the light; he expects Eames to nod and turn away, the Cobb-taught etiquette for totems, but instead the other man's eyes go narrow.

"So _that's_ what happened to my old loaded dice," he says, salt-dry and similarly bitter. He outstretches an expectant hand, closing the distance between them. (Not that that matters. Eames can cross a boundary by standing three feet from the edge of it.) Arthur braces himself against the railing and pulls his hand inwards; Eames snorts. "I don't want it back, idiot, I don't run dice cons anymore. I just want to look at it." Dice cons made up a surprising percentage of Eames's repertoire, Arthur recalls; nonetheless, he shakes his head.

"Still. It's my totem now."

"It's hardly any good for the purpose. I've probably held it more than you."

"But you don't know which one this is." The set was extensive; Eames never does anything by less than half-again.

"Fair point," the forger acknowledges, shrugging. He drops his hand and retreats a step but doesn't turn or even glance away; the balcony suddenly feels quite crowded in spite of the increased distance.

_Don't ask,_ Arthur begs, and Eames doesn't, but Arthur answers anyway because there is so much that wants to fly from his tongue and bury itself in the other man, and it may as well be this.

"I keep it," he says, turning away to roll it one last time and raising his voice to be sure Eames hears, "as a reminder not to gamble on anything I don't control." And with that, he drops the die in his pocket and stares down at the street below.

He doesn't turn around, just listens to the whisper of the sliding door.

* * *

_Some lonely night we could get together_  
_And I want to tie your wrists with leather_  
_And drill a tiny hole into your head._


End file.
